About Us

About us, Sandrine and Ellis

Sandrine and Ellis met in London whilst working as civil servants. Fifteen years and three children later, they decided to leave behind their scientific background in order to focus on their creative and spiritual side and to produce unique quality products that reflected their outlook on life. Ellis loves working with wood and does the cutting and sanding of each item, while Sandrine enjoys experimenting with colours and the finishing touches. Right now, Touchwood Products is still a small home-run business, which nevertheless fills Sandrine and Ellis with a lot of happiness and fulfilment.

Other than looking after their three beautiful and talented children and creating for Touchwood Products, Sandrine and Ellis have other interests in life. Sandrine has an interest in a healthy lifestyle, particularly through healthy eating and the use of natural or complementary therapies. Ellis is also a spiritual counsellor for those undergoing deep spiritual awakening or spiritual emergency. He holds regular meetings and facilitates workshops on spiritually-related topics such as meditations, sacred mantra and chakras, DNA activation and how to recognise the first stirrings of Kundalini awakenings. He also has great knowledge on the effects and dangers of Wifi and mobile phones on our health and can inform and advise anyone who is concerned about their exposure to electro-magnetic frequencies by carrying out readings in their home or work places.

How Touchwood Products started

Ellis and Sandrine have enjoyed practising meditation together since they met in 2001. This even included a brief spell of getting up at 4 o’clock in the morning to meditate during the violet hours! It is said that apart from this being a quiet time with the lowest noise and electro-magnetic interference, it is also the time when the angle between the earth and the sun is 60 degrees and that being in a sitting position at that time helps balance the pituitary and pineal glands, giving maximum results.

Thirteen years later, after leaving their jobs in the civil service and moving from the UK to Greece where part of Sandrine's family is from, Ellis was lent a wooden meditation stool that was hand made in India. He found it much more comfortable than the meditation cushion he had been using and got inspired to try and make one for himself based on that model. The meditation stool was made out of plain wood and Sandrine thought that it would be nice to decorate it and make a feature of it. The stool was made with foldable legs so that it could be put away under a sofa or bed and also easily carried.

First meditation stool leading to the birth of Touchwood Products.

The stool was ok, but its thin foldable legs made it unstable with the risk of them folding inwards before having sat on it. Also, this stool was made to sit in a kneeling position, which while Sandrine found very comfortable, Ellis didn’t like so much. This led Ellis to building the second meditation stool, with a wider but lower seat, made to sit in a cross-legged position.

Second meditation stool, wider, lower (made to sit in the cross-legged position) and with fixed legs.

While Ellis started experimenting with a series of meditation stools to find what would work best, Sandrine started dreaming about how to best ‘prettify’ them. She imagined how nice it would be for meditation classes or shops to have colourful stools on offer for people who may need more support when sitting on the floor and this was the seed for the creation of Touchwood Products. Yes, initially, it was only meant to be meditation stools!

However, while Ellis was perfecting the design of the stool, Sandrine started having itchy hands and couldn’t wait any longer to start applying colours to the wood. She came across some plain mirrors and decided to paint a large piece of wood, upon which the mirror would be stuck to give it a colourful border.

First mirror

Sandrine was happy enough with the result to keep going and they were both flooded with ideas of various products they could create. After having created and accumulated a good selection of products (including key holders, key rings, personalised nameplates, mantras, positive affirmations etc.) and having received positive feedback for them, they decided to open a shop on Etsy, called uniqueTouchwood, which started with a few products in October 2015. And this is how it all began, followed by the preparation and launch of their own website a year later and attendance at various craft fairs.

We hope you like our products and that you enjoy your browsing experience.